Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Obama hate and the phony scandals

Chris Matthews was howling the other day about Obama's ignorance of the AP phone record subpoena, which he thought was indefensible. "You don't think Bobby would have called Jack?" he asked incredulously. And he's right: Bobby would have called Jack. And that would have been wrong, which is why the Justice Department is now kept at a much greater distance from the White House. This is universally considered a good thing...Surely we haven't forgotten so soon after Watergate exactly why we prefer for the president to be kept very far away from criminal investigations? Ditto for the IRS, which for similar reasons is an agency that we've deliberately set up to be independent of the president. We don't want the president to have any influence over the IRS, and we don't want him kept apprised of the details of ongoing inquiries. It would have been a scandal if Obama had known any details about the IG investigation of the IRS's tea party targeting.

Ezra Klein does a nice job of deconstructing all three of the phony anti-Obama scandals.

2 Comments:

So what you are saying, essentially, is that the POTUS should be above the law and not held accountable for covering up government invasions of privacy and illegal searches and seizures? I take it the First Amendment doesn't mean much to you either, nor the rest of the Bill of Rights or the Constitution. There is a reason our founding fathers wanted government to have very limited powers, and this is it. They foresaw the giant monolith that the government has become. Barack Obama should be facing charges of treason for his actions, instead the DOJ looks the other way. He should be facing impeachment for his inaction in Benghazi, of which he did have full knowledge they needed better security BEFORE anyone was killed. Eventually, people are going to stop drinking the Kool Aid and he is going to run out of scapegoats.

What NSA is doing is in fact legal under the Patriot Act, which is why---except for Rand Paul--the Republicans haven't raised a fuss over the issue. The Benghazi security issue was botched---if it was botched---by Hillary Clinton's State Department. It never reached the President's desk for his consideration.